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Announcing OAE Ibis (OAE 10)!

The Apereo Open Academic Environment (OAE) project team is excited to
announce the tenth major release of the Apereo Open Academic
Environment; OAE Ibis or OAE 10.

OAE Ibis brings the ability for institutions to completely customise the
content and look of their tenant landing page. OAE Ibis also implements
a detailed user tracking framework and brings the long-awaited full-text
indexing and searching feature. Next to that, OAE Ibis also ships a
range of other search improvements and a large number of accessibility
improvements.

*Changelog*

*Customisable tenant landing pages*

OAE Ibis makes it possible for institutions to completely customise
their tenant landing page, allowing them to appropriately contextualise
their tenancy, present themselves and explain the main purpose of the
tenancy.

Tenant administrators are able to add any number of text, video and
image blocks to the landing page, set their styling and determine their
width on different devices, allowing for a fully responsive landing page
to be configured. All configured text can also be fully internationalised.

We are already looking forward to seeing what the institutions will come
up! We'll definitely publish a list of the best ones in an upcoming blog
post.

*User tracking*

OAE Ibis introduces a detailed user tracking framework to provide a
complete overview of how OAE is being used. Using an integration with a
3rd party service called Mixpanel (https://mixpanel.com/), OAE can now
keep track of almost all usage-related information: how many users have
signed in, how many content items have been created and what is their
distribution in visibility, how many comments were added, how many
public groups are there and how does this evolve over time, etc.

This provides a solid basis for making product decisions based on real
usage data and opens the door to performing A-B testing on new features.
In a future release, we will also be providing this information to
tenant administrators to give them a complete overview of how and how
actively their tenancy is being used.

*Full-text indexing*

Following numerous rounds of performance testing, OAE Ibis brings the
long-awaited arrival of full-text indexing and searching. The full
content of all uploaded PDF, Office and text files will now be indexed
and included in searches, making it a lot easier to find the content
you're looking for or discover interesting new content.

*Accessibility improvements*

As the first step in the process of trying to obtain a WCAG 2.0
accessibility certification for OAE, a full external accessibility
review of the OAE software has been undertaken by WebAIM
(http://webaim.org/). They delivered a review document containing a list
of recommended accessibility improvements, which is something we'll be
publishing and discussing in an upcoming blog post.

OAE Ibis includes accessibility improvements for the most critical
issues that were identified in the review, with more accessibility
improvements planned for upcoming releases.

*Search improvements*

Next to providing full-text searching, OAE Ibis also introduces a number
of additional search improvements.

When searching for people, there will now be a slight bias towards
people from your own institution. This should make it easier to find the
people you're looking for, and is the first step towards making further
improvements in this area.

Searches in content and discussion libraries will now also include the
text of the comments and discussions posts, making it easier to find the
content item or discussion you're looking for.

*Try it out*

OAE Ibis can be tried out on the project's QA server athttp://oae.oae-qa0.oaeproject.org. It is worth noting that this server
is actively used for testing and will be wiped and redeployed every night.

The source code has been tagged with version number 10.0.0 and can be
downloaded from the following repositories: